We talked about the new scientific and educational project “Obrazovach’s Lecture Hall: Gutenberg’s Smoking Room” with one of its creators,Roman Pereborschikov . InterviewedNatalia Demina .
— What is a Gutenberg Smoking Room?
— “The Gutenberg Smoking Room” is a popular science project, which in 2014 became, according to our data, the most visited non-profit lecture hall in Moscow.
— Who are its organizers?
— What is your format?
— The format of the events is a story about a particular area of knowledge based on the literature that amazed the speaker. During one event, the audience listens to three stories on almost any topic. The range of topics is so wide that a biologist, cosmologist and philologist can speak at one event. The duration of each performance is 30 minutes. Without pretending to be a full-fledged report, our goal is to interest the audience in studying the material independently. 
Tell us how it all started?
— We can confidently say that our project has not one, but two birthdays. The first day marks the birth of an idea. I can’t say the exact date, since it was three years ago, and no name existed then. It all started when Misha had the idea to retell popular science and non-fiction books in the company of friends, which amaze the imagination with their content so much that it is simply impossible to keep this desire to yourself. I think everyone has experienced this at some point. A company of about ten people, mostly friends and acquaintances, would gather at someone’s house, sit on the floor and share the information they had learned over a cup of tea or a glass of wine, depending on their preferences.
Of course, the impression from the first gatherings was not very good, since the retellings were done according to some kind of formal scenario, there was no exchange of emotions that are born after reading. But these were the first “pancakes”, then and to this day emotions are an integral part of every performance, and, undoubtedly, the audience really likes it. For about the next two and a half years, “Smoking Room” slowly but surely expanded. First, until there were too many people for an apartment, and then on the sites of libraries or organizations, which could accommodate 40 - 70 people.
— How do you select speakers? How is the examination carried out?
- Well, at first they were friends and acquaintances; there was no special need to conduct examinations. Then, with the expansion to the first public events, it was necessary to select topics according to the level of their adequacy, examination by logic, so to speak. At the same time, absolutely anyone could become a storyteller; no experience in public speaking or any skills were required, only the topic of “something non-fictional” and desire. This definitely endeared us to the audience; everyone could easily become part of this process. And then, the more people came to us, the more serious the selection was, we always wanted to match the scale.
Now it is much more difficult to become one of the speakers at the Gutenberg Smoking Room than in the beginning; there are a lot of people who want to do it. For this, the candidate must have experience speaking in front of an audience and be an expert in the field he is talking about. Sometimes we make exceptions, then one of the two conditions is enough. For example, Andrei Seryakov, a nuclear physicist, CERN employee and Science Slam winner, recently spoke with us, but he told us why European civilization was historically more developed in technology and socially than the same tribes of the African continent or the Inca Empire. Our format allows for such experiments, and we think it's very cool.
— Where did this name come from?
The name itself came from two components. “Smoking room” is like Misha’s memory of the student smoking room at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where sometimes very emotional disputes began about everything in the world. Gutenberg was chosen as the “owner of the smoking room” not only because he is the inventor of the first printing press, but also under the influence of McLuhan’s book “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” which Misha read at about the same time. As a result, this name stuck very well.
— Is smoking allowed at your events?
“We could take the name “Gutenberg’s Brothel,” but that doesn’t mean that we would give each person who came a girl of easy virtue. Although the idea is not bad. You can’t smoke; everything about this is stipulated in the legislation. My position on smoking is exclusively negative.
— Have you participated in the “Smoking Room” from the very beginning?
- No, not from the very beginning. I began to participate much later, just six months ago, but immediately set the goal of transforming the “Smoking Room” into “the best lecture hall in the country.” It's funny, but in a certain sense I have already succeeded. During this time, we have achieved a significant improvement in the quality of content, opened a channel on YouTube, joined forces with the Obrazovac project, launched a branch in St. Petersburg and rebranded.
The full name now sounds like “Obrazovach’s Lecture Hall: Gutenberg’s Smoking Room.” It’s clumsy, of course, but you can’t erase the words from the song. In general, the Obrazovac project is worth mentioning separately. Created it former employees"Lenty.ru" Andrey Konyaev, Igor Belkin and Alexander Ershov. In nine months, the Obrazovacha group on the VKontakte social network gained more than 150 thousand subscribers, publishing news on popular science topics and providing them with funny pictures “on the topic of the day.”
We found them very easily mutual language, literally one meeting and they shook hands, and then it went from there. Along with the new name, we got from them access to a whole army of knowledge-hungry brains. More than 200 people came to the first event in the Moscow Central Telegraph building, 250 came to the next one, and about twice as many watched the online broadcast. So we are forced to look for sites as large as possible.
- It's complicated? Now you can rent any premises.
— In general, there are certain difficulties with this, since the Gutenberg Smoking Room is a completely non-profit project and admission to our meetings is exclusively free. No one earns or receives bonuses. We are science volunteers. This, of course, is not a unique case, but on such a scale, I think this is the first time. We do not have a budget for purchasing expensive equipment or renting halls. Doors are opened to us solely because of the quality of the content and sympathy for the format.
— So you work for an idea?
- Yes. “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is a very personal project for quite a large number of people. When everything is done for free, then great value outside help plays a role. We can say that the “Smoking Room” is a human symbiosis, in which several dozen people participate, each of whom pursues the goal of popularizing science among the masses.
— What are your plans for the coming years?
— Speaking about the future, we are making quite a lot of efforts to expand into the regions. On January 9, 2015, our branch in St. Petersburg held its first event, which was organized by the guys from the KL10TCH IT club. The audience could hardly fit into two halls. Their success convinced us of the correctness of this idea. We plan to create branches in all cities with a population of over a million, and Kazan is next in line. Also in the summer, we plan, together with colleagues from other sites, to organize a large scientific festival in the Moscow region. But desire alone is not enough for this, so we are looking for sponsors and partners. We hope that such an event will be in great demand among young people and families with children.
If you subscribe to at least one popular science educational public page in in social networks, phrase "Gutenberg Smoking Room" you're probably familiar with it. It took this project about a year to transform from a Moscow semi-closed club of science fiction literature lovers into a volunteer network of lecture halls covering a dozen and a half cities across the country - from Moscow to Vladivostok.
The format of the “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is 3 open lectures of 30 minutes each about “life, the universe and all that” in a popular science vein, followed by discussion. Meetings can take place at any venue that can accommodate those interested: from university classrooms to fashionable cafes.
In July 2014, Roman Pereborschikov became the project manager, and the “Smoking Room” headed towards the lecture hall. They moved from stories about specific books to lectures on popular science topics, which also determined the conditions for choosing speakers: if initially it was enough to read a book and be able to talk about it in an entertaining way, now speakers must be experts in the field they are talking about. Not everyone scientific topics can be explained to an unprepared public “on the fingers” in half an hour, which is why requirements have arisen for the quality of video presentations.
The range of topics for lectures has always been wide - from classical philosophy to quantum physics. Everything related to the latest scientific data on the structure of man, society and the world at various levels can become the subject of discussion. The organizers said (and still say) a strict “no” to esotericism and personal growth training. Unless, of course, you want to look at them in a scientific way.
The meetings soon began to attract 200 listeners, and the speakers were real stars of scientific pop. But the Gutenberg Smoking Room would have remained one of many Moscow lecture halls (Muscovites can’t complain about the lack of intellectual events) if it had not stepped into the virtual space.
The first “Smoking Room” in the format of a large lecture hall in Moscow. Medieval historian Mikhail Mayzuls talks about the evolution of Japanese mentality.
In 2014, “Smoking Room” got its own YouTube channel, where video recordings of lectures began to be posted. The project has become friends with a super popular resource "Orazovac", whose VKontakte page now has more than 300,000 subscribers. “Obrazovac” gave access to an audience of thousands throughout Russia and a new name for what was happening (now officially it is “Obrazovac Lecture Hall: Gutenberg’s Smoking Room”).
Now enthusiasts anywhere in the country can be inspired by videos on YouTube, want their city to love science the same way, and write about this to the head of the Obrazovac Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room project, Roman Perborshchikov. Roman will readily tell you how to organize a lecture hall and provide information support. Moscow , Saint Petersburg , Kazan , Rostov-on-Don , Kaluga , Omsk , Astrakhan , Vladivostok , Mound , Ufa , Novosibirsk , Tomsk , Krasnodar , Chelyabinsk- cities that have already hosted the Gutenberg Smoking Room at least once. Video recordings of all performances from cities are sent to the editing department of the Moscow “Smoking Room”, which employs 10 people. Recently, recordings began to be provided with subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Biologist, scientific journalist and administrator of the VKontakte community “Scientists against pseudoscience” Alexander Panchin - about why you shouldn’t be afraid of genetic engineering.
“Essentially, we are encouraging the creation of lecture halls across the country. “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is not one lecture hall, but fifteen, united by one name and idea. Over the past year, we held more than 100 lecture events, which were attended by about 14 thousand people. Now about 80 people are involved in the project instead of just one, large museums and universities have become our partners, and the goal of the project is to create the first federal lecture hall in Russia,” as Roman says about the growth of the project, worthy of a good business presentation. But “Smoking Room” is a fundamentally non-commercial project.
The main advantage of our project is its main disadvantage - a completely non-profit development model. Usually, the lack of a budget puts an end to many projects that deserve attention from society, but we turned this minus into a plus. The lecture hall is expanding not by increasing the budget and staff, but due to the ideology that it personifies: the popularization of science in society through the efforts of society itself. Modern youth I am ready to take responsibility for what only universities and other educational and cultural institutions did before us.
Roman Perebshchikov
The baton of popularizing science in cities is often taken up by those who already have some organizational and educational experience. For example, in Kazan, the Smena Center for Contemporary Culture (we once) became the permanent site of the Smoking Room. In St. Petersburg, meetings are organized by the “live, warm lamp” discussion club “A Pinch of Salt.” In Vladivostok, the “Smoking Room” was developed by the team that had previously created the scientific cafe “Let’s Science!” on the basis of the Far Eastern Federal University.
We have been making the “Smoking Room” in Vladivostok since May of this year. And the desire to do it appeared because we were fascinated by the scale of the project. It’s nice to feel that your views on society’s need to popularize knowledge are shared by a fairly large number of people across the country.
In our city there are resources for creating educational projects enough. There are interesting specialists and requests from listeners. We actively cooperate with all educational platforms that we have, because together we can create more interesting and large-scale events. For example, together with another lecture hall, we organized a teleconference with the Moscow “Smoking Room”, during which we talked with the authors of the Sputnik Mayak rocket-building project.Anton Krotov coordinator of the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Vladivostok
A local TV channel talks about how the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Vladivostok organized a large-scale celebration of science as part of the All-Russian Enlightenment Prize festival.
If in Kazan, Smena managed to form a circle of listeners ready for different forms of conversation, then for many cities open lectures on science are a bold experiment, the results of which are difficult for organizers to predict. For example, after the first “Smoking Room” in Chelyabinsk (which took place just a month ago), the organizers admitted to a local journalist that they expected a maximum of 30 spectators. And 150 arrived! And the majority of them voted for a second one to take place after the first Smoking Room. Somewhere things are not going so well, and in Kaluga, for example, the format has not taken root (but it is quite possible that there will be people who want to try it again).
The third participant of the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Tomsk talks about video encoding.
The natural (and often the only) source of speakers in cities is the local scientific community. A young graduate student or a “settled” scientist of any direction can give a fascinating lecture to a completely new audience, and then collect views and “likes” on a common YouTube channel.
Any meeting of young scientists with the public, whether there are 70 people in the hall or 170, is already a success. In one case, an unexpected selection of lectures can be considered lucky: for example, one evening we listened to lectures on intuition, Plato’s philosophy and quantum physics; another time - about schizophrenia, political competition and firefighting; or - about dreams, quantum computers and string theory. The arousal of audience interest can be considered a special success when, after 10 minutes allotted for questions from the audience, the discussion moves to the sidelines and continues for another 20-30 minutes.
Denis Volkov coordinator of the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Kazan
Denis Volkov notes that physics and medicine have always successfully developed in Kazan, and representatives of these sciences traditionally receive standing ovations in the “Smoking Room”. For example, a lecture by practicing neurologist Ksenia Ovsyannikova on the neurophysiology of sleep once turned the lecture hall into a real clinic. Immediately after the lecture, a group of 15-20 students lined up in front of the lecturer-doctor, and the stream of questions, more personal than scientific, did not stop for about half an hour.
About the secrets of sleep - Ksenia Ovsyannikova, a neurologist from Kazan.
Roman Perebshchikov says that the popularization of science, first of all, must be popular, otherwise it turns into intellectual snobbery. Therefore, science is part of the Smoking Room events entertainment program, with lively presentations and talented speakers. It is important to tell people about science, because otherwise a person “stagnates” in his ideas about the world and cannot adequately perceive the changes that are taking place.
I feel that young people have now really become more interested in science. I think one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that the world around us is a world built by science. We already perceive the present as the “future”. This perception is manifested, among other things, in popular culture: films, TV series, animation. Increased interest in science is a derivative of the achievements of this science, since we understand that without it our world will return to the Middle Ages. In Russia, by the way, this interest is fueled precisely by the medieval obscurantism that reigns in the laws and in the implanted Orthodoxy. Because of this great amount young people turn to science because it represents freedom of thought.
Roman Perebshchikov project manager "Obrazovach's Lecture Hall: Gutenberg's Smoking Room"
Organizers of various popular science events often talk about the problem of a rapidly reaching “ceiling” in the number of audiences: the same people come to talk and listen to science, time after time, from site to site. The Gutenberg Smoking Room format helps to engage a new audience in the conversation, which is driven not so much by a thirst for knowledge as by curiosity. This curiosity will find time for three half-hour lectures, especially if the event is promoted on social networks.
Lecture hall in Kazan. Alexander Granitsa, clinical psychiatrist psychiatric hospital them. Bekhterev - about schizophrenia.
Thus, one of the most massive non-Moscow “Smoking Rooms” took place in September of this year in St. Petersburg. Discussion club
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Roman Perborshchikov, one of its creators, talks about the new scientific and educational project “Obrazovach’s Lecture Hall: Gutenberg’s Smoking Room”
The name of the project came from two components. “Smoking room” is like the memory of the author of the format, Mikhail Yanovich, about the student smoking room at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where sometimes very emotional disputes began about everything in the world. Gutenberg was chosen as the “owner of the smoking room” not only because he is the inventor of the first printing press, but also under the influence of McLuhan’s book “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” which Yanovich read at about the same time. As a result, this name stuck very well.
The name of the project came from two components. “Smoking room” is like the memory of the author of the format, Mikhail Yanovich, about the student smoking room at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where sometimes very emotional disputes began about everything in the world. Gutenberg was chosen as the “owner of the smoking room” not only because he is the inventor of the first printing press, but also under the influence of McLuhan’s book “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” which Yanovich read at about the same time. As a result, this name stuck very well.
- What is the “Gutenberg Smoking Room”?
- “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is a popular science project, which in 2014 became, according to our data, the most visited non-profit lecture hall in Moscow.
- Who are its organizers?
- The founder of the lecture hall and the author of the format is Mikhail Yanovich, producer of interactive applications. The curator of the project is your humble servant, former head of the online publication “Public Assembly”.
- What is your format?
- The format of the events is a story about a particular area of knowledge based on the literature that amazed the speaker. During one event, the audience listens to three stories on almost any topic. The range of topics is so wide that a biologist, cosmologist and philologist can speak at one event. The duration of each performance is 30 minutes. Without pretending to be a full-fledged report, our goal is to interest the audience in studying the material independently.
-Tell me how it all started?
- We can confidently say that our project has not one, but two birthdays. The first day marks the birth of an idea. I can’t say the exact date, since it was three years ago, and no name existed then. It all started when Misha had the idea to retell popular science and non-fiction books in the company of friends, which amaze the imagination with their content so much that it is simply impossible to keep this desire to yourself. I think everyone has experienced this at some point. A company of about ten people, mostly friends and acquaintances, would gather at someone’s house, sit on the floor and share the information they had learned over a cup of tea or a glass of wine, depending on their preferences.
Of course, the impression from the first gatherings was not very good, since the retellings were done according to some kind of formal scenario, there was no exchange of emotions that are born after reading. But these were the first “pancakes”, then and to this day emotions are an integral part of every performance, and, undoubtedly, the audience really likes it. For about the next two and a half years, “Smoking Room” slowly but surely expanded. First, until there were too many people for the apartment, and then on the sites of libraries or organizations, which accommodated 40–70 people.
- How do you select speakers? How is the examination carried out?
- Well, at first they were friends and acquaintances; there was no special need to conduct examinations. Then, with the expansion to the first public events, it was necessary to select topics according to the level of their adequacy, examination by logic, so to speak. At the same time, absolutely anyone could become a storyteller; no experience in public speaking or any skills were required, only the topic of “something non-fictional” and desire. This definitely endeared us to the audience; everyone could easily become part of this process. And then the more people came to us, the more seriously the selection was carried out, we always wanted to match the scale.
Now it is much more difficult to become one of the speakers at the Gutenberg Smoking Room than in the beginning; there are a lot of people who want to do it. For this, the candidate must have experience speaking in front of an audience and be an expert in the field he is talking about. Sometimes we make exceptions, then one of the two conditions is enough. For example, recently Andrei Seryakov, a nuclear physicist, CERN employee and Science Slam winner, spoke to us, but he told us why European civilization was historically more developed technologically and socially than the same tribes of the African continent or the Inca Empire. Our format allows for such experiments, and we think it's very cool.
- Where did this name come from?
- The name itself came from two components. “Smoking room” is like Misha’s memory of the student smoking room at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where sometimes very emotional disputes began about everything in the world. Gutenberg was chosen as the “owner of the smoking room” not only because he is the inventor of the first printing press, but also under the influence of McLuhan’s book “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” which Misha read at about the same time. As a result, this name stuck very well.
- Is smoking allowed at your events?
- We could take the name “Gutenberg’s Brothel”, this does not mean that we would give each person who came a girl of easy virtue. Although the idea is not bad. You can’t smoke; everything about this is stipulated in the legislation. My position on smoking is exclusively negative.
- Have you participated in the “Smoking Room” from the very beginning?
- No, not from the very beginning. I began to participate much later, just six months ago, but immediately set the goal of transforming the “Smoking Room” into “the best lecture hall in the country.” It's funny, but in a certain sense I have already succeeded. During this time, we have achieved a significant improvement in the quality of content, opened a channel on YouTube, joined forces with the Obrazovac project, launched a branch in St. Petersburg and rebranded.
The full name now sounds like “Obrazovach’s Lecture Hall: Gutenberg’s Smoking Room.” It’s clumsy, of course, but you can’t erase the words from the song. In general, the Obrazovac project is worth mentioning separately. It was created by former Lenta.ru employees Andrey Konyaev, Igor Belkin and Alexander Ershov. In nine months, the Obrazovacha group on the VKontakte social network gained more than 150 thousand subscribers, publishing news on popular science topics and providing them with funny pictures “on the topic of the day.”
We found a common language with them very easily, literally one meeting and we shook hands, and then it went from there. Along with the new name, we got from them access to a whole army of knowledge-hungry brains. More than 200 people came to the first event in the Moscow Central Telegraph building, 250 came to the next one, and about twice as many watched the online broadcast. So we are forced to look for sites as large as possible.
- It's complicated? Now you can rent any premises.
- In general, there are certain difficulties with this, since the “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is a completely non-profit project and admission to our meetings is exclusively free. No one earns or receives bonuses. We are science volunteers. This, of course, is not a unique case, but on such a scale, I think this is the first time. We do not have a budget for purchasing expensive equipment or renting halls. Doors are opened to us solely because of the quality of the content and sympathy for the format.
- So you work for an idea?
- Yes. “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is a very personal project for quite a large number of people. When everything is done for free, outside help plays a huge role. We can say that the “Smoking Room” is a human symbiosis in which several dozen people participate, each of whom pursues the goal of popularizing science among the masses.
- What are your plans for the coming years?
- Speaking about the future, we are making quite a lot of efforts to expand into the regions. On January 9, 2015, our branch in St. Petersburg held its first event, which was organized by the guys from the KL10TCH IT club. The audience could hardly fit into two halls. Their success convinced us of the correctness of this idea. We plan to create branches in all cities with a population of over a million, and Kazan is next in line. Also in the summer, we plan, together with colleagues from other sites, to organize a large scientific festival in the Moscow region. But desire alone is not enough for this, so we are looking for sponsors and partners. We hope that such an event will be in great demand among young people and families with children.
Interviewed by Natalia Demina
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We talked with one of the organizers of the Minsk non-profit educational lecture hall “Gutenberg Smoking Room” Zmitser Bylinovich to find out how the project with scientific lectures became so popular and what to expect from it in Minsk.
The idea of a smoking room appeared among Moscow students - first in the format of a book club, Zmiter tells us when we meet at the Ili club, where the second Minsk “Smoking Room” will take place on Saturday. - Initially, the guys got together and discussed the science they had read, like Hawking and Dawkins. But then Roman Pereborschikov, the current ideological inspirer and director of Kurilok, looked in and said that, guys, this is not a very interesting format, it should be moved to a lecture format. What was most surprising was that he was not sent, but the “Smoking Room” really quickly became a lecture hall, when people gather to listen to three half-hour lectures about life, the Universe and all that.
Lecturers, as a rule, are young scientists, junior and senior researchers, sometimes doctors of science, and sometimes senior students. After each lecture there is a short discussion and the opportunity to ask questions, and the lecturers, instead of trying to present the material in detail and looking at a piece of paper, try to simply open up the topic for the listener and encourage him to further study on his own. In a year and a half (largely thanks to information support public "Obrazovac") “Smoking rooms” appeared in 14 cities of Russia with more than a hundred events, which were attended by 14,000 people. These smoking rooms featured a variety of topics: from the nature of schizophrenia to the conquest of space.
Topics can be very different - only any pseudoscience is excluded. And, of course, no one will set the goal of teaching you to take triple integrals, the goal is to interest you and inspire you to do science yourself. And as a result, this format is in great demand - in Moscow, the non-profit “Smoking Room” holds events at three venues at once: about culture together with the Gogol Museum, about space together with the Museum of Cosmonautics and about neurobiology and other topics at the site of the Moscow State Engineering University with a capacity of 500 people .
Zmiter himself is a second-year student of applied mathematics at BSU, and another organizer, Dmitry Grishchenko, is a geophysicist and editor of the public page “Physics of the Impossible.” They learned about the “Smoking Room” while reading “Orazovac”, and then responded to the call to organize lectures in their cities and thus assembled the first Minsk “Smoking Room”:
- The first "Gutenberg smoking room" took place at the Minsk Planetarium on February 13. The main problem was in streaming due to the difficulties of the planetary Internet. But we were very surprised and pleased by the number of people. We announced the event in the public pages “Tea with raspberry jam” and “Online”, and within half an hour all 120 people that the Minsk planetarium can accommodate registered. This time we chose the new Ili club, as it seats 120-150 people, and you can also have a drink and food here during the break.
The second Minsk “Gutenberg Smoking Room” will take place on Saturday, March 12, at 16:00. There will be three half-hour lectures: the Russian popularizer of astronautics Vitaly Egorov, known on the Internet as Zelenyikot, will talk about whether there is water on Mars, where and how to look for it. Geophysicist and co-organizer of the smoking room Dmitry Grishchenko will explain what is unique about Lake Vostok and how studying it helps to understand the history of the Earth and solar system, and biologist Alexey Shpak will talk about why bats are so special and what accounts for their phenomenal longevity.
Registration for the smoking room is underway, but you can just watch live broadcast of lectures. And since there will be many more “Smoking Rooms” in Minsk, so as not to miss them, you can subscribe to the public “
The Gutenberg Smoking Room is a semi-private club in which members exchange summaries of the most important non-fiction books in the format of short TED lectures. In an hour at the “Smoking Room” you can find out contents of three important books that you just can’t get your hands on. Over the course of several years, the “Smoking Room” has transformed from kitchen conversations among graduates of the Russian State University for the Humanities into one of the most interesting edutainment projects a city that did not require a single ruble to create. The Village talked to the creator of “Smoking Room” Mikhail Yanovich about who needs all this and how it works.
About the idea
There is a book by McLuen, “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” which everyone has probably read. It’s about the fact that all knowledge, all the most interesting things are concentrated in the book and all the many books that he produced printing press Gutenberg, forms a galaxy. I've always really liked this metaphor.
When I was still in my final years at the Russian State University for the Humanities, I started to feel sick fiction: I ate it. The only kind of books that I could read at that time were either books about the profession (I took accounting courses to take over the publishing business from my father), or science fiction and non-fiction. And I immediately became sad that there were so many books, it was impossible to read them all, and at the same time it was autistically difficult to be alone with a book for a long time. And there is, of course, a difference when you read on your own and when someone tells you something in a living voice. What is told is remembered better and more vividly.
Mikhail Yanovich
31 year
Education: graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities (Mark Blok Center for Historical Anthropology)
was engaged in publishing, in 2011 he came up with the project “ Gutenberg smoking room»
Probably, the desire for interesting thoughts to be heard out loud is common to all of us. Maybe it’s from childhood - the love of sitting in my parents’ kitchen when friends come over and chat. Talking about books is generally a kitchen story.
About smart girls
I don’t remember at all how we started making “Smoking Room”. My friends and I were gathering at my house. I once suggested: “Guys, let’s try to retell something, who read what and who remembers what.” And it was unbearably shameful - only later did I learn from one of the speakers at the “Smoking Room” such a phrase - second-handed confusion. This is when you feel awkward for your neighbor, he understands that you feel awkward for him, and you all begin to feel awkward.
I painfully survived several such smoking rooms, but I did not give up the idea and continued to persist. I began to think what the problem was. And then it became clear to me that everything was being retold within the framework of one scenario: some formal retelling, some financial statements, and not a story about your emotions. As a result, we came up with a recipe for the best retelling - this is when you retell the things that most hooked you, which add up to a single story.
You feel awkward
for your neighbor, he understands that you feel embarrassed for him,
and you start to experience everything feeling awkward
About brain plasticity
and the birth of prison
In 2012, I read Norman Doidge’s book “Brain Plasticity”, and it became the book of the year for me. I was so stunned by what I read that I couldn’t keep it to myself. I realized that this is a book with a great aftereffect, after which you want to rush into the attack and which needs to be retold. I turned to familiar bookstores that had their own sites, and Reading Cafe let us in.
We came up with the name “Gutenberg’s Smoking Room” and the slogan: “Read and retell. Life is short - there are many books." “Smoking room” - because, according to my impressions, at the university the smoking room was the most effective space for personal growth. I didn’t smoke there so much as I talked: you listened to a lecture, there were five minutes of something interesting, and you retell this to some parallel person who didn’t hear it, mixing it with stories from your personal life.
To our horror, 70 people came to the Reading Cafe. How they found out about us is a mystery. Three retellings were announced. Two retellers came: I talked about “Plasticity of the Brain,” and my friend Misha Mayzuls talked about Michel Foucault’s absolutely killer book “Discipline and Punish” about experiments with prisons and psychiatry. I had a generally monstrous retelling (the friends who came told it), but Misha saved the day.
After this time, a constant number of people appeared who wanted to participate in the smoking rooms, and everything started to turn around. Now smoking rooms take place extremely sporadically: once every three months or twice a month, and this depends solely on the enthusiasm of those who wish to do so.
We are all so smart here - beautiful, interesting, in love,
A it turns out to be some kind of Soviet library
About the format
We have two formats - an apartment party, when we just get drunk in a mild form at my house and meet new people-speakers. The entrance fee is a short (5-10 minutes) retelling. And a large public smoking room, where we have three or four speakers, each of whom is given 20 minutes for stand-up (on a stopwatch) and 10 minutes for questions.
You can choose any non-fiction book with some restrictions: we have banned everything about politics, religion and esotericism. We don’t take on politics, because all political conversations are inevitably confrontational - I don’t see anything productive for myself in this. We also try to avoid books on psychology, because there is a lot of bias in there.
Most people come to read business literature and psychology. These books attract a very predictable audience - young marketers, PR people, guys starting their careers. If we talk about scientific research, the most interesting retellings come from various graduate students or research assistants.
One of the most interesting retellings was by Ilya Kolmanovsky. He talked about Edward Larson's book, based on the letters Robert Falcon Scott wrote from the South Pole, knowing that he was doomed. This is the story of such a very adventurous approach to generating scientific knowledge, when a person is so interested in the world that he is ready to undergo trials and death for the sake of science. In Ilya Kolmanovsky's retelling it was amazing. Always excellent retellings on ethology and animal behavior.
According to my impressions, at the university the smoking room was the most efficient space for personal growth
About networking
We do not take money from visitors. “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is not about money at all. This is a kind of club of interests, no matter how terrible it may sound. For me, “Smoking Room” is networking, a way to gather a lot of people in one place interesting people. I would like, for example, Leonid Parfenov to get a kick out of it and come to us to retell some book that greatly impressed him. I'm really interested in what books have influenced people whose biographies are fascinating and who you admire.
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